Sabine Meyer received her PhD from the Department of Northern European Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin, and is a scholar of Scandinavian literature and transgender studies. Her publications include “Divine Interventions: (Re)Birth and Creation Narratives in Fra Mand til Kvinde” KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING (2011), and “Mit dem Puppenwagen in die normative Weiblichkeit: Lili Elbe und die journalistische Inszenierung von Transsexualität in Dänemark,” NORDEUROPAforum (2010). Her book, “Wie Lili zu einem richtigen Mädchen wurde”—Lili Elbe: Zur Konstruktion von Geschlecht und Identität zwischen Medialisierung, Regulierung und Subjektivierung, was published in the Queer Studies series from transcript in 2015. With Pamela Caughie, she is currently co-editing a comparative scholarly print and digital edition of Man into Woman (1933), the life narrative of Lili Elbe.
Sabine Meyer
Contributions
Contemporary genealogies of transgender are now returning to the scene of the modern, for the modernist era witnessed tremendous change in concepts of sexual and gender identity. In turn, contemporary modernist scholarship is returning to fin de siècle sexology. Michael Levenson in Modernism (2011) makes the case for the sexologist’s case study as an experimental modernist narrative form.[2] In 2016 Benjamin Kahan published Heinrich Kaan’s “Psychopathia Sexualis” (1844): A Classic Text in the History of Sexuality and edited a cluster for Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus platform on “sexual modernity.”[3] And currently we, with Nikolaus Wasmoen, are co-editing the first comparative scholarly edition of Man into Woman (1933), the life narrative of “Lili Elbe,” who, as Einar Wegener, was one of the first people to undergo gender confirmation surgery in 1930.[4] Thinking about the display of this text in both print and digital versions raises an interesting set of connections between transgender theory and a theory of the literary work as an historical artifact.